Fintech Alexa Skill User Research
UX RESEARCH - User Research - Interaction Design - Team Project
The Goal
As part of a collaboration between the University of Michigan's infoLab program and NBCUniversal, a student group and I set out to help CNBC introduce a voice experience that focuses on personal finance for millennial users. Over the course of the winter 2019 semester, we conducted user research and gathered enough data so we could begin the development of an Alexa Skill prototype that would cater to the financial planning habits of millennials.
The Process
Background Research - The first thing we set out to do was to identify the information that already existed regarding financial planning and voice assistant technology. We found that outside of finance news and a few personal banking skills, finance was for the most part still a relatively untapped area of the voice assistant market. Feeling we had a fresh slate to work with, we decided most of what we would design and recommend would come from focused user research.
User Interviews - As a group we conducted a total of eight user interviews. All interviewees ranged from 23 to 30 years of age, all were relatively new to the workforce and held jobs in a diverse range of fields. We designed our interview protocol to find out users current financial planning habits, barriers to entry, and how they incorporated technology into their financial planning. From what we gathered we were able to conduct some qualitative analysis and turned our findings into empathy maps.
Personas - Based on our interview findings and empathy maps, we decided we had two personas that we needed to design a solution for. The first persona is constrained by a lack of financial knowledge and financial stability to make serious financial planning decisions. The second persona has the knowledge and income to invest in their future, but lack the time and energy to feel comfortable making the decisions they should make.
Findings & Recommendations - We believe that young workers enjoy passive investing and are influenced mainly by social groups and peers. Users are either intimidated by the subject of financial planning or would rather not have to think about it as much as they should. Our ideas to find a voice assistant solution were to integrate education and financial planning and to create a platform over voice that users could invest and learn with friends.
The Result
We pursued two main ideas to present to the client and created very early prototypes of each in the form of voice maps. Both ideas were centered around the idea of creating a skill that acted like "a smart friend with great advice."
The first idea is to put financial education in the context of current events. This idea was inspired by foreign language learning resources that help novice speakers learn vocab and listening skills through the news. The main idea of the skill is that the user can ask Alexa for the top financial news stories of the day. Then, based on the content in the headlines and main points, the user can explore important terms and get definitions and clarifications to things they might not understand.
Our second idea was to integrate the Acorns app into an Alexa Skill. Users would be able to do most of the functions of Acorns through their voice and would be encouraged to make investment decisions all without having to pick up their phone.
Link to detailed voice maps: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kxkD7fs=/
Challenges
Due to time restraints, we could not go any farther with this project than the initial development of these prototypes. Had we more time to work we have liked to validate our interview findings with surveys and focus group sessions. We also ideally would have been able to conduct some usability tests of our prototypes and create two or three more iterations of them.